Snake Problems

Who knew you could take care of your snake problem with a wild eastern cottontail rabbit? Crazy, right? That’s what happened to us one Sunday morning. We were all sitting around on the back porch, hanging out, talking, and watching the wild life in our yard. We live on a large enough property, a few acres, and we get lots of wild animals that come through, doing their thing. Mostly they stay clear of our house, but sometimes we have problems.

Lately, we’ve had some pretty large, but harmless snakes that have been coming around. They’re seeing if they can get hold of some baby rabbits or some mice or some other tasty little treat. A few years back, we found one in the kitchen. Seems a few mice had gotten into the house and decided to nest under the sink. It was a little while before we knew, because we were on vacation. The mice had started to breed, and I guess a snake could hear them in there, because it crawled on in after them for dinner. We walked in from our vacation to the Tetons to find out we had a snake problem and a mouse problem right there in our house. Well, we got a professional wildlife control guy out who took care of our problems and cleaned the house out. He also stopped up all of the holes we could find, and that’s pretty much worked ever since.

But, like I said, they mostly stay out in yard. When animals cause trouble or start digging things up, we call in our professional wild animal control guy again. But, sometimes, we just sit out on the porch and watch nature take its course.

We were doing just that when we saw a good-sized snake slithering toward a rabbit’s nest. The eastern cottontails just dig a shallow den right on the ground and that’s where they have their babies. This snake was just going for a tasty snack. The next thing we know, mama rabbit jumped right on the snake! We thought it was a one-time thing, like the rabbit didn’t know what it was doing at first. But, again and again, it jumped at that big ol’ snake. It must’ve bit it, too, ‘cause that snake went slithering for cover fast.

The snake must’ve thought it just needed some distance away from the baby rabbits, but mama rabbit wasn’t happy with that, either. She just kept at it, jumping, attacking, biting until the snake got desperate. It made it to a tree and climbed on up, the rabbit jumping higher and higher and biting until the snake got up high enough in the branches. I didn’t ever believe it was possible for a snake to look scared, but I swear it was terrified. Guess we won’t have much of a snake problem while that one rabbit’s out on patrol.